Richard Fenno’s seminal work on Congress has covered such areas of the field as committees and the appropriations process. But it is with the study of “home style” that the renowned Rochester political scientist has made his biggest contribution. As he did in Congressional Travels: Places, Connections, and Authenticity (2007), Fenno revisits the subject of legislators in their constituencies in The Challenge of Congressional Representation. Here, he takes his trademark sociological, even anthropological, “soaking and poking” or “travel and talk” (p. 14) approach to study five House members in their home districts from the early 1970s to the early 2000s. In doing so, he rescues Barber Conable, Jim Greenwood, Zoe Lofgren, Glenn Poshard, and Karen Thurman from anonymity and their inevitable “burial in large data collections” (p. 1). The goal is to direct congressional scholarship’s attention away from Washington and bills, votes, procedures, and rules to members’ behavior off of the Hill. This, in turn, should provide a better understanding of the ways in which modern federal lawmakers represent their constituents.

Fenno’s five members are certainly diverse. Two are women, two Republicans. Their districts are scattered all over the country, from Lofgren’s in Silicon Valley to Conable’s in western New York. Poshard’s is largely rural, Greenwood’s is suburban, and Lofgren’s urban. Superimposed on a sprawling part of northwestern Florida, Thurman’s district is not easy to categorize.

This variation results in rich and very personal representational styles. Conable emphasizes his deep roots in the rural areas and small towns of his district. He is comfortable with people and believes human relationships guide what he does in Washington. We learn that Conable’s understanding of constituency helped Fenno construct the famous concentric-circle approach to the subject in Home Style: House Members in Their Districts (1978). Poshard’s folksy nature gives him an unusual sensitivity to constituents’ personal problems, and he believes that casework is important. As a result, he spends a great deal of time at home and assigns significant staff resources to the district. He also has a rather romantic understanding of representative democracy and talks repeatedly about the integrity of the legislative process and his obligation to understand House procedure and vote on all measures, whether large or small. Thurman is much more interested in public policy and the substance of the congressional agenda. Her nondescript district forces her to create a sense of community among her constituents. She provides us with insight into the relentless need to raise money and how excruciating that task can be. Representing a suburban Philadelphia district, Greenwood works hard to present himself as a pro-business, pro-environment moderate. He is focused on advancement in the House Republican conference and spends as many hours at home fending off internal party attacks from the Right as he does meeting with the public. Lofgren is friendly, but businesslike and a little aloof. An unabashed liberal from a liberal district, she readily understands the needs of her constituents. Lofgren’s biggest challenge is educating high-tech companies around San Jose about the importance and ways of Congress.

Alone, these portraits make engaging reading. Together, they allow some patterns to form, even if they are a little sketchy. We gain a greater appreciation for the heterogeneity of House districts. Fenno shows us the considerable representational challenges posed by redistricting. He even describes how critical the support of family is to lawmakers. The behavior of the members he studies toward the end of his project demonstrates how partisanship and polarization shape home styles. The district was formerly a different world from Washington, filled with parochial concerns and practical problems. Today, legislators spend their time there debating national issues, explaining votes and bill sponsorship, bolstering the party brand, and talking about the president’s recent decisions.

Fenno’s is an explicitly case-study method, and for a body that has had about 2,000 members since the early 1970s—when he began his observation of Conable—its five examples cannot be used to generate systematic findings in which we can have a great deal of confidence. Indeed, the book’s findings are suggestive. We might conclude that representational activities, presumably as a result of the country’s great heterogeneity, are tremendously varied and that, for better or worse, they consume a great deal of time and effort. That really is about it. Quantitative and large-n studies will more immediately advance our understanding of this realm of congressional studies. There is, for example, a significant amount of recent and important research using press releases and correspondence, sometimes in innovative field experiments reminiscent of the Fenno style. Much of it exploits data sets containing many thousands of discrete interactions between members and their constituents. The work of people like Daniel Butler and Justin Grimmer comes to mind.

The author is well aware of this. That his goals are limited is made quite explicit. His first objective is to place “connection politics” (p. 9) on the research agenda because he thinks that they are neglected but critical to any broad understanding of representative democracy. In this way, the five cases constitute “flavorful vehicles through which to make an argument in support of constituency-centric research on the United States Congress” (p. 2). The members chosen are interesting people doing important things. Fenno obviously enjoyed writing the book. It is hard to think of a more persuasive advertisement for a research topic that you could put in front of a doctoral student who has just passed his or her comprehensive exams or a new assistant professor looking for that first postdissertation project.

The second aim is to mobilize colleagues. In his endeavor to nudge congressional studies away from its “lopsidedly legislation-centered research agenda” (p. 228), Fenno wishes to begin a many-scholar collaboration. Given the considerable time and resources involved in gathering data on representational activities and ensuring consistency across multiple subjects, he invites researchers to build upon what he has done. He suggests they might assign their graduate students to shadow different members of Congress. This is just one way to build a more comprehensive knowledge base.

The book will not be as authoritative as Home Style. However, if the readers recognize the shortcomings described by Fenno, they are in for a treat. The author might also succeed in his recruitment efforts, and the study of congressional representation will one day emerge from the shadows of the voluminous and more influential Washington-focused work on our federal legislature.